Medical procedures where laser light is directed at tissue for treatment have been in use. Most of the laser treatment methods used today share a common disadvantage: all require great expertise with poor reproducibility, and this creates a great variation in the results. There are reported problems such as hypertrophic scarring and inhomogeneity of blanching due to inhomogeneous energy delivery and dosage. In addition, these manual methods are tedious and time-consuming, and usually require several sessions over a period of months.
Furthermore, many conventional methods require manually moving a handpiece over a treatment area, and as a result, this movement is operator dependent and duplication of initial treatment motion is not possible with subsequent applications. Movement of the beam out of focus and variation in the angle of the beam modify the spot size. The speed of the handpiece moving across the lesion is also not controlled. Therefore, each of these inconsistencies may result in very inaccurate coverage due to poor dosimetry.
As a result, laser tools that incorporate additional features for aiding the operator of such laser tools in providing effective treatment have been in development.
With respect to laser treatment apparatuses with various target location and control schemes, reference is made to the following:
Kurtz et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,501,680, relates to a laser operation and control system comprising a laser, control circuitry for activating and deactivating the laser, a boundary sensor, and a proximity sensor.
Hohla, U.S. Pat. No. 5,634,920, and Hohla, U.S. Pat. No. 5,827,264, each discloses a technique for controlling a laser apparatus for removing tissue from the eye that uses oscillating, or dithering, to prevent reinforcing ridges from being formed during the tissue removal process.
Jeng, U.S. Pat. No. 5,865,828, is directed to a coaxial dual laser apparatus for ablating surface lesions gated by the degree of surface small vessel blood flow via detection of Doppler shift.
Knopp et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,865,832, discloses the use of pattern recognition and edge detection methods in correlation trackers for tracking the human cornea for laser treatment.
Arakaki et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,931,779, involves a technique for measuring the absorption spectrum of tissue using spectrographic equipment for non-invasively taking spectroscopic measurements of tissue. The measured spectrum is corrected for light scattering effects, such as by taking the second derivative of the data.
Chen et al., U.S. Pat. No. 6,047,080, relates to a method for in-room computer reconstruction of a three-dimensional (3-D) coronary arterial tree from routine biplane angiograms acquired at arbitrary angles and without using calibration objects. The method includes, among other steps, detecting, segmenting and identifying vessel centerlines and constructing a vessel hierarchy representation.
Wu et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,963,676, involves a method of enhancing an image in X-ray angiography that includes preprocessing an input image using an edge-preserving smoothing filter to reduce noise effect.
Heilbrun et al., U.S. Pat. No. 6,146,390, is directed to a technique for defining the location of a medical instrument relative to features of a medical workspace including a patient's body region. Image filtering and edge detection are used for defining the edges of an instrument.
Kudrall, U.S. Pat. No. 6,190,377, relates to a technique for predicting an effective and safe laser light energy range for sub-epidermal laser surgery. The method includes first impinging a measurement laser pulse on a predetermined treatment area. The thermal emission caused by the measurement laser pulse emanating from the treatment area is then detected and the delay time from the measurement laser pulse to the detection of the thermal emission is measured. The rise rate of the thermal emission is then measured. The layer thickness is then calculated based upon the delay time, wherein the layer thickness is substantially the epidermal thickness. An internal measurement temperature rise is calculated based upon the layer thickness and the rise rate.
Bantel et al., Global Tracking of the Ocular Fundus Pattern Imaged by Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscopy, International Journal Biomedical Computing, Vol. 27, 1990, pp. 59–69, discloses using a tracking algorithm that includes edge equalization to process a scanning laser ophthalmoscopic (“SLO”) image.
Each of these references provides laser apparatuses with various target location and control features. None of these patents, however, discloses or suggests a laser treatment apparatus with a flexible control platform that provides for accurate, real-time, and non-invasive targeting and treatment for different types of procedures.
It has therefore been found desirable to design a laser treatment apparatus with the advantages as noted below.
The following are hereby incorporated by reference:
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